When Hillary Clinton was endorsed by Will Quigg, a grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in California, many observers were skeptical that the statement of support for the presumptive Democratic nominee was genuine. Indeed, some went so far as to argue that the very public backing of Clinton by a white supremacist of Quigg’s standing was a diversionary tactic designed to either smear Clinton or distract attention from former grand wizard David Duke’s endorsement of Donald Trump, which the presumptive Republican nominee failed to disavow. Regardless of whether the support of Clinton was genuine or not, the fact of the matter is that Clinton policies have indeed been unconscionably destructive for Black Americans, and other people of color.

African-Americans have few reasons to vote for Hillary Clinton. No one understands this better—and says it more forcefully—than Michelle Alexander, civil rights activist, author, and professor of law. She has studied the public life of the Clintons, chronicled their catastrophic impacts on black lives, and observed their self-serving, hypocritical pandering to the African-American community.

The Clintons have always cultivated a warm affection for African-Americans. One iconic image shows Bill riffing on his saxophone for Arsenio Hall. Another pictures Hillary hugging parishioners in black churches. Similar beguiling images appear daily in the media as her presidential campaign progresses.

The affection seems to be mutual. It was apparent in the primary elections across the South, where black voters gave Hillary Clinton overwhelming majorities. But their loyalty is tragically misplaced: the Clintons’ affection is not matched by a serious commitment to relieving the poverty, prejudice, mass incarceration, and second-class citizenry suffered by much of the black community today.

Former President Bill Clinton recently slipped on some silly talk when trying to dance around a slime trail oozing from his presidency during the 1990s.

This hooey moment came during Bill Clinton’s finger-wagging attempted smackdown of a Black Lives Matter activist who called-out Clinton during a campaign event for the devastating impact the 1994 federal anti-crime bill he sought and signed had on black communities nationwide.

“The uncompensated crime and tragedy of racial oppression in before and after slavery continues to accumulate its blood and financial cost to this very day.”

I am never more than slightly encouraged about white America’s capacity for breaking from the United States’ deeply embedded racism when I hear one of my fellow US Caucasians report that they’ve viewed the Black British director Steve McQueen’s powerful movie Twelve Years a Slave and were “moved” (sometimes to tears) by it. It’s good that some US whites have retained enough inner humanity to recognize and recoil from the revolting racist cruelty and abominable torment that lay at the heart of the Southern US slave system depicted in Twelve Years a Slave. Sadly and sickeningly enough, untold millions of white Americans have been induced to think of the slave South as some kind of quaint, benign, and paternalistic time and place when benevolent white masters cared for the black chattel they viewed as inferior “family members.”

Twelve Years a Slave burst that childish white historical bubble with a relentlessly true-to-life and death portrayal of 1840s and 1850s slave traders, slave-owners, and slave-drivers as ferocious and perverse sociopaths, exploiters, torturers, sadists, and rapists. Based on the published 1853 narrative of Solomon Northrup, a free Black Northerner who was kidnapped and sold into Georgia cotton slavery, the film rightly portrays the slave system as a living Hell for its Black victims.

Tuesday night, in his next-to-last State of the Union address, President Obama flashed the suckers a bag of tricks that has no chance of passing the Republican-controlled Congress, but will allow his apologists to claim that the genuine, more progressive Obama is revealing himself in his final two years in office. Of course, the final-years Obama could have accomplished his modest 2015 agenda, and much more, back in 2009 and 2010, when Democrats dominated both the House and the Senate and the Republicans were in despair and disarray. Which is precisely why Obama chose, instead, to put his party’s perishable congressional majorities at the service of bankers, Wall Street, private insurers and Big Pharma. Now that Democrats are the endangered species on Capitol Hill, Obama hangs a piñata of subsidized community college education, additional tax deductions for child care, seven days paid sick leave, higher capital gains taxes on the wealthy, and billions in fees on casino bankers.

“Jackson was supplanted by Al Sharpton, who surpassed him in crookedness and politically prostitution.”

If a picture is worth 1,000 words the photo above proves the old adage to be true. This image encapsulates so much that is wrong with the so-called leaders of the black political class. Each of the three men depicted make a mockery of any claim to be allies of black people.

For decades Jesse Jackson’s seal of approval was enough to quiet or excite the masses to action. As a young lieutenant of Martin Luther King and then as leader of Operation PUSH he became in effect the leader of what was left of the civil rights movement old guard. His presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988 mobilized millions of people to vote and brought election victories to progressives across the country. His history is part righteous and part mercenary, as he sought and received tribute from corporations around the country eager to curry favor with him and by extension the masses he sometimes did represent.

“The domestic counterinsurgency army has been methodically expanded by each successive administration.”

The corporate media, reflecting their owners’ anxiety at the failure of Black people to revert to a state of passivity in Ferguson, Missouri, have arrived at a general consensus on two counts: the need to “demilitarize” the police (fewer bullets, smaller armored vehicles?) and, more immediately, to re-establish some semblance of “calm” (as in comatose) in the neighborhood and beyond. Corporate-attuned Black powerbrokers and politicians deliver essentially the same message, counseling (quiet) introspection and a search for “solutions” (diversions) to the historical oppression in which they are deeply complicit.

But first, tensions must be reduced, to diffuse the confrontation – which, we are told, serves no one’s interests but the “agitators and instigators” (who, apparently, have millions of dollars in derivatives wagers riding on urban chaos). Fortunately, the “street” ignores the misleaders. If Ferguson had remained “calm” in the face of Michael Brown’s murder, nobody outside greater St. Louis would know the place existed.

"When you say ‘jobs,' he says tax cuts – just like the Republicans, only Obama first cites the pain of the unemployed, so that you know he cares."

"Believe it," said the current Prevaricator-in-Chief, in the conclusion to his annual litany lies. President Obama's specialty, honed to theatrical near-perfection over five disastrous years, is in crafting the sympathetic lie, designed to suspend disbelief among those targeted for oblivion, through displays of empathy for the victims. In contrast to the aggressive insults and bluster employed by Republican political actors, whose goal is to incite racist passions against the Other, the sympathetic Democratic liar disarms those who are about to be sacrificed by pretending to feel their pain.

Barack Obama, who has presided over the sharpest increases in economic inequality in U.S. history, adopts the persona of public advocate, reciting wrongs inflicted by unseen and unknown forces that have "deepened" the gap between the rich and the rest of us and "stalled" upward mobility. Having spent half a decade stuffing tens of trillions of dollars into the accounts of an ever shrinking gaggle of financial capitalists, Obama declares this to be "a year of action" in the opposite direction. "Believe it." And if you do believe it, then crown him the Most Effective Liar of the young century.

Just as misplaced debates about civilian gun control were emerging in the wake of the massacre in Aurora, a billboard was raised in Idaho by a libertarian organization placing the face of the Aurora shooting suspect beside that of President Obama. The text surrounding James Holmes’s reads: “KILLS 12 IN A MOVIE THEATER WITH AN ASSAULT RIFLE. EVERYONE FREAKS OUT.” The text surrounding Obama’s reads: “KILLS THOUSANDS WITH HIS FOREIGN POLICY. WINS NOBEL PEACE PRIZE.”

The reaction of the Village Voice—“extremely offensive,” one headline states—to the billboard is exemplary of the chronic softness of liberalism on issues of war. In the media overall, this softness has led to the current emphasis on civilian gun control, which is an emphasis that is now actively removing the spotlight from the violence of the state while increasing fear of the general public. Surely the Village Voice that hosted the late, great Alexander Cockburn would never have so unforgivably favored etiquette over truth.

Three years ago this week, more than 2 million souls, at least half of them African American, converged upon the nation's capital. They came, in what my colleague Glen Ford called the Great Black Hajj of 2009, to witness and celebrate the swearing in of the nation's first African American president. They wept and danced and sang and prophesied. They marveled at how far they had come. It was, their leaders assured them, the beginning of a new day.

Three years later, it's clear that this is indeed a new day, a new era. But for most of black America, it's not the one they hoped for. Nobody expected urban poverty would begin to vanish overnight, or that millions of acres of lost black farmland would be restored. But promises were made, and expectations were justifiably high, not because Barack Obama had promised to investigate Wall Street, prosecute banksters, or stop the imperial wars and illegal foreclosures, but because humans do have the right to expect justice at home and peace abroad, whether their leaders deliver these things or not.

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by BAR editor and columnist Jared Ball
December 15, 2011blackagendareport.com

“We need to encourage a renewed focus on the politically incarcerated because we are likely to see those ranks increase.”

After this week's rally for Mumia Abu-Jamal in Philadelphia, at which much of the focus was his being removed from death row, at least one thing has again been made clear; going forward all movement building must deeply involve the plight of political prisoners. This point was made several ways by several different speakers, including Cornel West who described the more than 30 years of this particular fight, and Desmond Tutu who cautioned that the move of Mumia from death row was cool but not a real victory – and who better than a veteran of the freedom struggle in Azania to tell us about incomplete “victories.” And there was the tireless Ramona Africa who echoed Tutu’s sentiments by acknowledging that not being in solitary confinement was itself no guarantee of safety, and how Mumia’s enemies considered this move a close second to actual execution since he would now be in general population with “his own kind” and likely, hopefully, to be killed by one of them. So what was a rally and tribute to Mumia was also a lesson to be learned about the kinds of struggle required, a lesson we all can use at this time of outspoken frustration with the current world.

Now that the CIA’s proxy army has murdered Gadhafi, what next for Libya?

If Washington’s plans succeed, Libya will become another American puppet state. Most of the cities, towns, and infrastructure have been destroyed by air strikes by the air forces of the US and Washington’s NATO puppets. US and European firms will now get juicy contracts, financed by US taxpayers, to rebuild Libya. The new real estate will be carefully allocated to lubricate a new ruling class picked by Washington. This will put Libya firmly under Washington’s thumb.

With Libya conquered, AFRICOM will start on the other African countries where China has energy and mineral investments. Obama has already sent US troops to Central Africa under the guise of defeating the Lord’s Resistance Army, a small insurgency against the ruling dictator-for-life. The Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, welcomed the prospect of yet another war by declaring that sending US troops into Central Africa “furthers US national security interests and foreign policy.” Republican Senator James Inhofe added a gallon of moral verbiage about saving “Ugandan children,” a concern the senator did not have for Libya’s children or Palestine’s, Iraq’s, Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s.

“The ruling allows the Philadelphia district attorney to once again seek the death penalty in a new sentencing hearing.”

The United States Supreme Court has ruled that the death penalty imposed on Mumia Abu Jamal, the world’s most famous political prisoner, is unconstitutional because the sentencing jury was not allowed to consider evidence that supported a sentence of life in prison. But the ruling allows the Philadelphia district attorney, Seth Williams, a Black man who has based his career on executing Mumia, to once again seek the death penalty in a new sentencing hearing. If Williams does not seek, or fails to get, a another death penalty, Mumia Abu Jamal will automatically be sentenced to life with no possibility of parole in the 1981 death of a Philadelphia police officer.

“Obama has very publicly commanded them to shut up and perform what he believes is their only legitimate function: to get him re-elected.”

This magazine spent much of the 2008 presidential campaign warning that reflexive, unquestioning, uncomplaining support for Barack Obama would render African Americans politically irrelevant for the next four years. “About 90 percent of Black America has allied itself with a candidate that never promised them a damn thing,” we wrote, back on April Fools Day, 2008. One year before, in Selma, Alabama, Obama had first deployed his pseudo-Baptist preacher delivery to announce that Blacks had already come “90 percent of the way” towards equality, strongly inferring that his election would take us the other ten percent of the way, while simultaneously sending “a signal to whites that the days of Black racial agitation were nearly over.”

The phony debt ceiling crisis was, from beginning to end, a con. It was an elaborate and successful hoax in which the nation's first black president, the Democratic and Republican parties, Wall Street and corporate media all played indispensable parts. The object of the supposed “crisis” was to short circuit public opinion, existing law, democratic process and traditions of public oversight, in order to deal fatal blows to Medicaid, Medicare, social security, job growth and public expenditures for the common good. It worked. We've been conned.

President Barack Obama as First Actor in the Con

The key actor in the con was and is Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic party and president of the United States. When the Bush and Obama administrations bailed out the banksters in 2008, 2009 and 2010 they didn't print new warehouses of greenbacks and send them over in a fleet of trucks. The Federal Reserve simply opened its spreadsheets, and wrote numbers with lots of zeroes crediting the banksters' accounts. It literally created the new money by giving it away, and next proceeded to borrow those funds back from the banksters at interest. The debt ceiling crisis was nothing but those same banksters twirling their mustaches and oinking “Well, we don't think you (the government that created the money by giving it to them) can really afford to repay all these loans you've been taking out... We might have to downgrade your credit rating...”